A two-dimensional, zonally-symmetric tracer advected in the Northern Hemisphere. Reference: Peter Mills (2004) “Following the Vapour Trail: a Study of Chaotic Mixing of Water Vapour in the Upper Troposphere.” Master’s Thesis, University of Bremen CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain

It’s time for me to let you in on a secret. It’s not a big kind of secret secret, but it’s something that a few people out there would prefer you didn’t know. Kind of like a stage magician guild doesn’t want one of their members explaining how all the tricks work.

Look, it’s of interest to a lot of people — agencies and groups of people, too — to map who talks to whom. And to map what groups of people believe. And to see who in those groups are more influential, and who is more connected. The more totalitarian a government gets, the more interested in this sort of thing it becomes. For all the reasons you’d think, if you ever thought about it.

The trick is the Statistically Improbable Phrase. The made-up or misspelled word or grammatically ignorant clause or clever turn of phrase. These things are radioactive dye injected into the bloodstream. Barium enemas. Colored smoke in the air. Blood in the water. And they’re used to map human networks through social media. Through email and telephone calls too, if you’ve got the access.

An example: Google “dhimmitude“, a word invented in 1982. It’s use marks a network dominated by anti-Islamic sentiment, and the transmission vectors of this network are, by semantic analysis of their public communications, under-educated and fearful of outside domination or loss of privilege. The latest payload inserted into the network, detailed here in Snopes, uses a classic “dogs barking” opening (messages expressing fear or anger are far more likely to be forwarded than anything delivered in a neutral tone, much the way one dog barking at a raccoon in the night will start all the dogs in the neighborhood barking) and then blatantly lies about something that would take a lot of trouble to verify in a transparent attempt associate (high-energy) anti-Muslim fear with (lower-energy) distrust of the Affordable Care Act, thereby using the higher-energy carrier to spread the anti-ACA propaganda further. This also has the side-effect of enlarging the “dhimmitude” network for future propaganda purposes.

Then, of course, social networks can be polled on the “dhimmitude” keyword campaign to track any growth in the human spambot “dhimmitude” network. And provide feedback on the effectiveness of the last “dhimmitude” transmission to make sure it was worth the money spent developing the draft of the message. (Yes, these things are done for money — and the pay-by-the-word rate is the best a writer can hope for.) And then set a price for future access to the network to be paid by people who want to send them more propaganda.

These days it doesn’t take a lot of effort to see what networks someone active in social networking is a part of (or has been infected by, if the detected networks are insidious). A quick scan for the usual suite of keywords and statistically improbable phrases in perpetually scrolling timeline feeds is quite an excellent mapping tool, made tons more useful by a list of links to friends and followers who can also be mapped. A few lines of programming script makes it all a trivial task. And if you “like” a page of mine on Facebook, even something harmless that just shares jokes and funny pictures, this gives me an “in” for looking at your content and scanning your connections to friends and other known networks.

Blood in the water.

So next time you “like” something cute or funny you see on Facebook (from someone you don’t know personally) or “Share This if…” or forward an angry-sounding email that has already passed through numerous hands, please understand you are being studied for use as a propaganda vector and human spambot. By people who will be paid very good money to use you, who have no reason at all to have your best interests at heart. In fact, it is in their best interests to keep you ill-informed, angry, and ignorantly barking.

This one time I was standing in one of the rooms upstairs in the church adjacent to the baptistry where new Christians change into baptismal robes and dry off afterward. I’m not really sure what I was doing there. I walk around when I need to think, but I can’t really walk around outside like […]